13 HOUSES

In 1997, the in­ves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Car­les Porta made a short film for TV3 (Cata­lan Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion) about Tor, a tiny ham­let near An­dorra in which three mur­ders had been com­mit­ted in the mid-1990s. Since then he has spent 30 years car­ry­ing out fur­ther re­search into the case, and in May and June of this year he re­leased a stun­ning do­cuseries called Tor, la muntanya maleïda (Tor, The Ac­cursed Moun­tain), the ham­let in ques­tion being named after the huge moun­tain it gives onto. The ori­gins of the con­flict go back to 1896, when the moun­tain was de­clared the joint prop­erty of the 13 heads of fam­ily, their own­er­ship being con­di­tional on their per­ma­nent res­i­dence in the vil­lage. This even­tu­ally led to ar­gu­ments be­tween the fam­i­lies as to who re­ally lived there all year round and who didn’t, a dis­agree­ment which, in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tury, co­a­lesced around the two vil­lage caciques, who went by the nick­names El Palanca and Sansa. Ten­sions rose to the ex­tent that both men hired two body­guards each: the first deaths were caused when the body­guards of one were shot dead by those of the other. Even­tu­ally, in a half-cocked at­tempt to dis­solve the feud, a judge de­clared that as Sansa was now the only in­hab­i­tant to live in the vil­lage all year round, he was the right­ful owner of the en­tire moun­tain. Five months later he was blud­geoned to death at an un­known lo­ca­tion and his corpse dragged, prob­a­bly by more than one per­son, into his own home.

Any­one might be for­given for think­ing that find­ing the killer of a big landowner in a ham­let of 13 houses should be child’s play, but there were count­less sus­pects. In the 1940s, peo­ple smug­glers - many of them An­dor­rans - guided Jews flee­ing the Nazis across the Pyre­nees, some of whom they robbed of gold and jew­ellery. Tor was on one of the most con­ve­nient es­cape routes, and ru­mours had it that a few of the fugi­tives had buried their valu­ables there for safe­keep­ing, with a view to col­lect­ing them later. No won­der, then, that for a while Tor was a tar­get of eager gold seek­ers with metal de­tec­tors, who were chased away by Sansa: could one of them have beaten him past an inch of his life? Since the 1970s, there had also been a small com­mu­nity of hip­pies liv­ing on Sansa’s land: two of them were ac­cused by a wit­ness of hav­ing clubbed Sansa to death. An­other hippy, a man with a vi­o­lent crim­i­nal record who was once closely trusted by Sansa, had a se­ri­ous dis­agree­ment with him, so Sansa threw him out of the vil­lage, mak­ing him a venge­ful sus­pect. Yet an­other vil­lager was spot­ted in a bar in a neigh­bour­ing vil­lage with blood on his clothes the night Sansa was killed. Two of Sansa’s other hip­pies held up con­voys of to­bacco smug­glers’ ve­hi­cles at gun­point and de­manded money, so these smug­glers might also have killed the gun­men’s boss. El Palanca, the other cacique, was fu­ri­ous with Sansa’s plans to turn the moun­tain into a ski re­sort, so may have mur­dered Sansa (or had him mur­dered). Ru­mour has it that Car­les Porta even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered who the mur­derer was, but was un­able to re­veal his name in the pro­gramme for legal rea­sons. But per­haps all that re­ally mat­ters are Tor’s his­tory and the peo­ple who af­fected this tiny vil­lage for decades, mak­ing it a fas­ci­nat­ing mi­cro­cosm of a dark side of life which can be found in so many other places. If not in ab­solutely all of them.

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